1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to an active monitoring system for serial monitoring devices and the method thereof. In particular, the invention relates to an active serial monitoring system whose monitoring device and triggering device are connected so that the triggering device automatically transmits a device tag. The invention also relates to the method for the same.
2. Related Art
In recent years, the rapid developments in semiconductor-related industry and networking technology have enabled wider and more mature applications of monitoring systems. For example, an operator can monitor a remote serial device (e.g., a serial monitoring device) via the Internet, without being directly in front of the serial device. This does not only save manpower, but also effectively reduce the costs.
However, when the above-mentioned monitoring system needs to increase the serial devices to be monitored, one may encounter the problem of compatibility. This is because the added serial devices may come from different hardware vendors. Each of the serial devices has its devoted monitoring software and uses a different serial communications protocol, such as Modbus RTU, Canbus, DeviceNet, Interbus, etc. It is therefore an important issue for the data exchange interfaces of these devices to be compatible with each other.
In view of this, hardware vendors and software vendors publicly propose the Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control (OPC) so that different monitoring software can connect and exchange data with devices made by different hardware vendors. Nevertheless, this method cannot be compatible with serial monitoring devices that do not have OPC. Since the OPC detection method is done by polling, the method cannot effectively perform real-time monitoring. Moreover, an intrinsic constraint of polling is the problem of extra bandwidth occupation.
In summary, the prior art long has the problem of compatibility with non-OPC serial monitoring devices, real-time monitoring, and bandwidth usage. It is thus imperative to provide an improved technique to solve them.